Editor's Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of "No Need to Panic About Global Warming," an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6. --------- We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by...

The promoters of the global warming hysteria never really recovered from Climategate, the release of e-mails and data which demonstrated that climate insiders were using questionable data, promoting misleading arguments, and conspiring to block dissenting views from the scientific literature. It... --snip-- This is the dead giveaway that the "confidential strategy memo" is a fake, and that is what the real scandal has become. The Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle helped break this open with an initial post raising questions, as well as a detailed follow-up. McArdle gets a little too far into the weeds of information technology, not to mention...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing a packed meeting in the Palace of Westminster (don’t tell the Clerk of the Parliaments), at which Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke even more brilliantly than usual on “global warming”, and engagingly answered many questions from Parliamentarians and the public. Afterwards, Dick went to brief a Cabinet Minister (who shall be nameless, but he is a good egg, and privately regards catastrophic manmade “global warming” as nonsense). The Minister indicated – in effect, and with scarcely-concealed regret – that the party line set by David Cameron in response to various opinion polls,...

AGU weighs in on Gleick: “AGU is disappointed that Dr. Gleick acted in a way that is inconsistent with our organization’s values.” AGU Encourages Integrity in all Aspects of Climate Change Discourse Scholarly Society Rejects Deception Regarding Heartland Institute Documents February 21, 2012AGU Release No. 12-11For Immediate Release In response to a blog post late yesterday, 20 February 2012, by Dr. Peter Gleick regarding documents purportedly from the Heartland Institute which he disseminated, AGU President Michael McPhaden issued the following statement: “AGU is disappointed that Dr. Gleick acted in a way that is inconsistent with our organization’s values. AGU expects...

WASHINGTON — In the field of climate science, when someone — especially skeptics — did something ethically questionable or misrepresented facts, scientist Peter Gleick was usually among the first and loudest to cry foul. He chaired a prominent scientific society’s ethics committee. He created an award for what he considered lies about global warming.Now Gleick admits that he posed as a board member to get and then distribute to the media sensitive documents from a conservative think tank that is a leader in denying mainstream climate change science.

In a sensational public confession a leading climatologist, Peter Gleick has admitted to taking part in a high-profile climate emails forgery that has backfired; says it was done to intentionally injure skeptic foundation. Britain’s pro-green national daily, ‘The Guardian’ was the first major newspaper to break the news that Dr. Peter Gleick had confessed to unlawfully libeling the prominent climate skeptic supporter, the Heartland Institute (HI). Heartland is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”

We haven’t written on this item yet because, well, it’s so easy to kick ‘em when they are down. But we’ll deign to indulge just this once: The global warmists are at it again. Remember ClimateGate? They call this one FakeGate. James Taylor at Forbes sums it up nicely today: . . .

Legislation to fight global warming has disappeared from Washington’s policy agenda, but the battle over climate science continues to escalate. The latest skirmish culminated in the admission Monday night by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and author, that he assumed a fake identity to obtain documents that would expose the inner workings of a climate skeptic group. “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved,” Gleick wrote in a post...

The Guardian: Gleick apology over Heartland leak stirs ethics debate among climate scientistsWhoops. Suzanne Goldenberg unwittingly exposes how empty the Ethics Vault is in establishment climate science. Peter Gleick used a false identity to steal documents, and released them without permission and without an effort to redact private irrelevant details. So let’s ask climate scientists if stealing, deception and breaching privacy is OK. It’s a yes or no choice, is it a/ heroic, or b/ misguided? We’d hope a ten year old could get this one, but Goldenberg tells us that its thrown “the scientific community into tumult, with fierce...

Receiving an email with a statement like “You should resign, and if you don’t, I’ll work to see that you are fired” or “I know where your kids go to school” would be unsettling enough. But they “pale compared to what other climate scientists are getting,” says Raymond Orbach, director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, at whom the first threat above was aimed. Now climate scientists—in atmospheric physics and chemistry, geophysics, meteorology, hydrology, and oceanography, among other disciplines—have begun to fight back. “I think the community is finding a voice,” says Ben Santer of...

Clouds around the world may be falling in response to rising global temperatures and having a cooling effect on global warming, according to analysis of satellite data by Auckland University scientists. The first 10 years of data from the NASA Terra satellite, which uses nine cameras at different angles to produce a stereo image of the world's clouds, shows their average height has lowered by about 1 per cent, or 30 to 40 metres. Most of the reduction was due to fewer clouds occurring at very high altitudes, says the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

On February 16, I published “Anatomy of a Global Warming Hoax” concerning the theft of the private records of The Heartland Institute’s board meeting and the creation of an alleged forged document intended to harm its reputation as a long time advocate of the real, not fake, science that has been the basis of the global warming—now called “climate change”—hoax. The Feb 21 issue of The Wall Street Journal published an editorial, “The Not-So-Vast Conspiracy” noting that “As for ‘the largest international science conference of skeptics’ Heartland will, according to the documents, spend all of $380,000 this year on the...

Theft, deceit and outright lies: How ugly can climate science get? Prominent climate scientist Peter H. Gleick relied on deceit and subterfuge to solicit a cache of sensitive internal documents from conservative think tank The Heartland Institute before leaking them to the press -- a fresh scandal that further darkens the highly charged debate on planetary climate change. Gleick -- an internationally recognized hydroclimatologist and author of the respected annual report “The World’s Water” -- said he received an anonymous document in the mail that tipped him off to what he described as Heartland’s efforts to muddy public understanding of...

All fossil fuels must be cut to avoid global warming, scientists sayBy Mike De Souza, Postmedia News February 21, 2012 6:10 PM OTTAWA — Two Canadian climate change scientists from the University of Victoria say the public reaction to their recently published commentary has missed their key message: that all forms of fossil fuels, including the oilsands and coal, must be regulated for the world to avoid dangerous global warming. "Much of the way this has been reported is (through) a type of view that oilsands are good and coal is bad," said climate scientist Neil Swart, who co-authored the...

The Headline at WUWT is: BREAKING: Gleick Confesses*****************************EXCERPT*************************************Posted on February 20, 2012 by Anthony Watts Since I have started updates here, I’ll keep this post as a “sticky” – new content will follow below it and linked within updates. – AnthonyUPDATE15: 11:08AM 2/21 Unbelievable. Daily Kos elevates Gleick to hero status (via Tom Nelson):Daily Kos: Hero Scientist responsible for Heartland Expose Hero scientist, Peter Gleick, a water and climate analyst is the one responsible for exposing the Heartland agenda to spread misinformation and lies and subvert any real action for the climate change crisis. He did so at considerable risk...

Commenter FP writes: Hmm, they’ve removed Peter Gleick’s name from this page:http://www.agu.org/about/governance/committees_boards/scientific_ethics.shtmlIt was there four days ago, according to google’s cache. Has he resigned/been fired already? It had read as the page screencap shows: (from Google cache here) Chair Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute, Oakland, CaliforniaNow reads:

From Gleick's Huffington Post confession: Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues....

Guest post by David ArchibaldThe most skillful climatologist the World has seen was Hubert Lamb (1913 – 1997). He can be credited with making the first prediction of the current solar minimum. This was in 1970 in a report (Weiss and Lamb) for the German Navy.He did it by making a reconstructed record of the average frequency of southwesterly surface winds in England since 1340. Quoting Lamb “We sense a cycle or periodicity of close to 200 years in length.” and “There may be a valuable indication of the origin of this apparent 200 year recurrence tendency, in that the...

Josh from CartoonsbyJosh.com writes: Another ‘Gate’ – but this one turned round and bit the owner.Leo Hickman and co at the Guardian thought they had a bona fide leak of incriminating information on the funding of climate skeptics by the Heartland Institute.Two problems, the funding turns out to be rather small beer, especially in comparison to the vast sums of money paid to promote Climate Change Alarmism. Secondly it looked like the funds were going to fund scientists and with another trenche for a website to explain climate science research.Hardly a surprise, and not exactly incriminating. It is what the...

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.Since then, the documents...

Major embarrassment for Joe Romm, and DeSmog and their unthinking fans.In the hours after the ClimateGate emails were released, skeptics asked about their authenticity (as we are want to do). In the hours after the Heartland Documents (including at least one complete fake) were released, the commentators on the other side did not even ask (just as they uncritically accept any weak report in favour of their pet theory).They leapt to their defamatory conclusions in a smear-fest. At least one person out there has probably committed a criminal act. The rest are guilty of small brained unskeptical blind hatred, defamation,...

DeSmogBlog thoroughly investigates the academic and industry backgrounds of those involved in the PR spin campaigns that are confusing the public and stalling action on global warming. If there's anyone or any organization, ( i.e. scientist, self-professed "expert," think tank, industry association, company) that you would like to see researched and reported on DeSmogBlog, please contact us here.

When it comes to dealing with climate change—and reducing carbon emissions, the top man-made cause of warming—the international community is doing a crap job. The U.N. process is bogged down, with ambitions that seem to shrink each year even as the summits themselves grow longer and longer. So with the front door locked on climate action, it might be time to try the back. That’s why the U.S.—as well as representatives from the U.N. and several other countries—is getting behind a new initiative to reduce black carbon, methane and other “short-lived” greenhouse gases, so called because they remain in the...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Thursday the formation of a new global coalition to fight emissions other than carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. The coalition—which includes Sweden, Mexico, Canada, Bangladesh and the U.S. will be funded with $15 million, mostly from the U.S. It hasn't yet determined which actions it will take to reduce the emissions, nor has it identified specific reduction targets. The administration is also putting up federal dollars for clean-energy investments, unveiling a 2013 budget plan this week that sets aside hundreds of millions of dollars for wind, solar and other clean-energy...

People who claim that “the science is settled” on global warming have to be pretty unsettled by the science news in the last week.“Setttled science”, of course, means that we are inevitably headed toward a disastrous warming of surface temperatures as forecast by some computer models, and we therefore need an international carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, pronto.Settled science would know all of the important “forcings” and “feedbacks” in the climate system, such as the sensitivity of surface temperature to changes in carbon dioxide (a forcing) and the behavior of clouds, which could either enhance or counter warming (a feedback).Now...

“We can expect the onset of a deep bicentennial minimum of total solar irradiance (TSI) in approximately 2042±11 and the 19th deep minimum of global temperature in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11. After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055±11.” –Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Russian Academy of Science, 1 February 2012

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts Foreword: Dr Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, authors of a new controversial skeptic book now hitting German bookstores, have asked me to post their response to comments made by climate scientist Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in an interview by NTV television. Feulner insists that CO2 plays the major role in climate change and that the sun has little impact.You can read about the new book just published in Germany that is causing an uproar in the German green establishment here. The response is so vitriolic...

Do Latest Solar Studies Confirm Upcoming GlobalÂ Cooling? Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts Guest post by Matti VooroImage via Wikipedia I fully support the findings ofÂ Jan Â–Erik Solheim , Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum and their very recent paper called The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24Â dated February 2012. The abstract reads: Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend...

Global warming: Been there, done that. Forward-looking folks are adjusting their fretting machinery now to something called Cycle 25. Button up your overcoats. Ice is on the way. Global warming, which was mostly a scam invented by researchers looking for government grants, is over. The great warming phenomenon, which was supposed to have sent polar bears to vacation in Miami Beach by now, ended in 1997. Britain’s Met Office, which tracks weather and makes forecasts, and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the source of much global warming research (some of it faked, some of it not), agree,...

Â“THE CO2 LIES Â… pure fear-mongering Â… should we blindly trust the experts?Â” ThatÂ’s what GermanyÂ’s leading daily Bild (see photo) wrote in its print andÂ online editions today, on the very day that renowned publisher Hoffmann & Campe officially released a skeptic book Â– one written by a prominent socialist and environmental figure.This is huge. More than I ever could have possiblyÂ imagined. And more is coming in the days ahead! The Bild piece was just the first of a series.Mark this as the date that GermanyÂ’s global warming movement took a massive body blow.Today, not one, but two of...

Skeptics are winning: “The carbon market is dead” The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus...

... A new mini-report from the environmental group Climate Nexus points out that climate change is poised to wreck Valentine’s Day, or at least change it significantly, by threatening chocolate production. That’s right. Global warming is very bad for chocolate. Research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture found last year that as temperatures rise, the principal growing regions for cocoa could shrink. Other elements of the Climate Nexus report say similar changes are already affecting the best sugar cane areas of the world, and are partially responsible for a 30% decrease in sugar production in Indonesia in 2011. Also,...

Professor Ian Clark just does not see any evidence of oil sands contributing to global warming. That’s quite a stand to take in the face of a global environmental community that considers the development of the Canadian heavy oil industry tantamount to hastening the end of the world.But Prof. Clark can claim to know a bit more about the science behind climate change than the average person. As a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa, he focuses on paleoclimatology — the study of changes in climate taken on the scale of the entire history...

An overview: Understanding the Global Warming Debate Posted on February 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts Guest post by Warren MeyerLikely you have heard the sound bite that Â“97% of climate scientistsÂ” accept the global warming Â“consensusÂ”. Which is what gives global warming advocates the confidence to call climate skeptics Â“deniers,Â” hoping to evoke a parallel with Â“Holocaust Deniers,Â” a case where most of us would agree that a small group are denying a well-accepted reality. So why do these Â“deniersÂ” stand athwart of the 97%? Is it just politics? Oil money? Perversity? Ignorance?We are going to cover a lot of...

STOCKTON - The city has a tentative plan to combat climate change, more than three years after reaching a legal settlement with the Sierra Club and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown. It wouldn't be cheap. If adopted by the Stockton City Council later this year, the plan could cost the city $28.5 million and could cost the private sector $240 million, the document says. The plan itself acknowledges it would require "substantial effort on the part of the entire Stockton community" at a time when people are struggling to pay their bills and keep businesses open.

A team of scientists say that sprawling seagrass in the shallows of the Mediterranean may be the oldest living organisms on Earth, far older than humanity itself. Working off of DNA samples, a team of scientists say clumps of seagrass between Spain and Cyprus could be as old as hundred of thousands of years old. The study comes as scientists have sought to increase studies concerning how various organisms will face the changes from global warming. The team of scientists studying the seagrass say that the organism is facing threats from higher than normal sea temperatures and pollutants introduced by...

LONDON -- Meteorologists say ice-free seas in the arctic caused by global warming could explain a chill wind covering much of Europe that has killed more than 300 people. Experts said they believe complex wind patterns are being affected as melting arctic sea ice has exposes huge areas of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above, bringing bitterly cold weather to Britain and the rest of Europe. The loss of arctic sea ice could be influencing high-pressure weather systems over northern Russia that bring very cold winds from the arctic and Siberia to Western Europe and the British Isles, scientists...

From the Weather is not climate unless we say it is department: Over at Climate Progress, paid propagandist Joe Romm wails about “journalistic malpractice” from Michael Mann’s words in a tweet: The wailing (Jan 31st and again Feb 4th) was because the LA Times didn’t use the words “global warming” or “climate change” in a story about the mild winter in the USA. But Romm and Mann both ignore the much bigger story of a bitterly cold winter in Europe with snow reaching into northern Africa which has caused nearly three hundred deaths. Conversely, there doesn’t seem to be any...

From Tom NelsonEmail 600, Sept 2007: Watts expose makes NOAA want to change entire USA method Email 600 [Tom Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center] We are getting blogged all over for a cover-up of poor global station and US stations we use. They claim NCDC is in a scandal by not providing observer’s addresses. In any case Anthony Watts has photographed about 350 stations and finds using our criteria that about 15% are acceptable. I am trying to get some our folks to develop a method to switchover to using the CRN sites, at least in the...

Environmentalists are torn over the high cost of breaking reliance on fossil fuels. Industrial-scale solar development is well underway in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration over the last decade — 21 million acres. In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team. "I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental...

Cooking the booksBy Christopher Monckton of BrenchleyMr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good...

Normally I don’t go for anonymous guest posters, but this one is from the famous “zombie” of zombietime.com whose identity remains hidden so that he/she may continue to record the anarchy and socially bereft behavior that permeates the McKibbenesque protestor culture of America. Zombie wrote to me yesterday asking that I bring attention to the post, and I’m happy to do so. The text is below, but please follow the link to the evidence (dozens of scanned pages) presented. The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era? Guest post by “Zombie”I just finished reading a...

It seems much of the world is wising up to the Global Warming Alarmism that has driven so much foolish and costly taxation and regulation, subsidies and profiteering. Well, much but not all of the world. Here’s a quick overview, courtesy of the British Global Warming Policy Foundation: . . .

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Anthony Watts UAH Global Temperature Update for January 2012: -0.09 deg. CBy Dr. Roy Spencer PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been unavailable for a while…my oldest daughter was in a bad car accident, will be OK eventually, but won’t walk for about 3 months. So, I might not be answering queries.The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for January, 2012 took a precipitous plunge, not totally unexpected for a La Nina January (click on the image for the full-size version):The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and...

Hand back your science degrees Trenberth et al. Thirty eight of the worlds top, most consequential climate scientists sought to slap down the Nobel prize winner, astronaut and glitterati of science, and all they could come up with was a logical fallacy and a single paragraph of incohate, innumerate, and improbable evidence. It’s hand-waving on stilts.Is that the best they can do?Trenberth and co try to rebut No Need to Panic About Global Warming, but those 16 eminent scientists quoted evidence and pointed out major flaws in the assumptions of the theory. They described forms of scientific malpractice, and called...

The Earth's temperature hasn't increased significantly in about 15 years, which wouldn't be big news except global warming extremists had predicted temperatures would soar during that time because of manmade greenhouse-gas emissions. That forecast would be just another failed hypothesis, except governments around the world used the threatened overheating as an excuse to regulate, tax and subsidize in order to curb greenhouse gases and, of course, to save the Earth. . . .

Actual title is : It’s baaack! The plan to kill talk radio. Group advising White House wants to restore controversial policy An organization that helped to craft President Obama’s environmental policies has recommended the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, purportedly as a method of silencing critics of the theory of global warming. The Presidential Climate Action Project, or PCAP, last year released an extensive list of recommendations for the White House in a 75-page paper entitled, “Building the Obama Administration’s Climate Legacy.” Primary among the PCAP’s recommendations is that the Department of Energy should join the U.S. Department of Housing...